Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://twitter.com/francska1/status/1518916591299309569?t=I0SOJQmY-onYzMEHL7UWz...
The second best army in the world hasn't been able to defeat the gay neo-Nazi Satanists in Maruipol.

Understand that in Russian Nationalist discourse, ‘Nazi’ means ‘not Russian, Western influenced’

So gay Nazis, Jewish Nazis, etc. makes perfect sense to them. A Nazi is a westerner whose out to get Russia in their minds,

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Maybe the Russians have planned an invasion from Transnistria to push towards Odessa.

Do they have more than a nominal troop deployment in Transnistria?
And even if they do, how are they supposed to equip and support an invasion force, what with all that Ukraine in the way?
Not that something being monumentally stupid will stop the Russian military from doing it, but I wouldn’t worry much.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

If Russia moves against Moldova now, it will be more of a change in strategy for the Ukraine war than greed for Moldova itself. It will mean that Putin will focus more on holding eastern and coastal Ukraine, choking it off. And that means Russia will focus more on just holding those areas and then just do sporadic bombing and incursions into Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine for years to maybe over a decade… until western arms shipments to Ukraine finally dry up, western sanctions against Russia finally end, and then a decade-battered Ukraine with no access to the sea is finally completely annexed by a more war-hardened Russian military. This could very well go until 2035. Moldova probably means a more dangerous and competent long-term strategy. It’s a relatively poor, small, landlocked country by itself.

Again, how are they getting to Moldova? It really doesn’t look like they are making any progress West/north of Kherson and they simply don’t have the resources to take Odessa.
Transnistria has a token Russian force and a couple thousand local fighters. And it’s land locked and I hardly think either Moldova or Ukraine is just going to let the Russian move supplies there.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

We now have the name of one of the Russian Generals allegedly killed by the Ukrainian strike on the Command and Control location outside of Izyum.


https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1520480816966647808?s=20&t=FY5eyXgM...

As one twitter comment said, "General? He looks like Mike from accounting". A reddit post claimed his current position was Chief of Staff of the 2nd Guards Combined Arms Army. Simonov's biography from what looks to be a publication from 2014-16, translated through Google Translate. I guess he was promoted to general in the intervening period:

"Deputy Chief of the Electronic Warfare Troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Colonel Andrei Dmitrievich Simonov was born on June 29, 1966 in the village of Baranovka, Verkhnekamsky District, Kirov Region. After graduating from the Tomsk Higher Military Command School of Communications in 1987, he served in the electronic warfare units as an operational duty officer, platoon commander, head of the command post, and deputy battalion commander for operational work. In 2000 graduated from the  M. V. Frunze Military Academy. After the academy, he went from a senior officer of the electronic warfare service of the Siberian Military District to the head of the electronic warfare service of the headquarters of the Vostok regional command. In 2010, he graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff and was appointed Chief of the EW Service of the Headquarters of the Western Military District. Since August 2014, he has been Deputy Chief of the EW Troops of the RF Armed Forces. He was awarded nine medals of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, including the medal "For Military Valor" I degree."

https://docplayer-com.translate.goog/42759499-Yuriy-illarionovich-lastochkin.html?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

Do you remember the in-over his head nerdy middle management type selling pills from the factory to Nacho in Better Call Saul?
He’s a dead ringer.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

I cannot see how Ukraine can resist this invasion.

But I didn't think Bosnians had a chance against the Serbs (Chetniks) in the 1990's either.

Putin does risk a lot here, so he will want this over short and sharp.

This has never been about repelling the initial invasion. Russia will overrun Ukraine if it really wants to.

The question is what happens after that.

So...anyone want to dunk on me for this? Worst take of mine in years. Never been happier to be wrong.

I think we all underestimated the impact that Western weapons deliveries are having on the war.
Go back to the battle for Hostomel airport. Had Russia won there, things would likely be much bleaker for Ukraine right now.

They reportedly almost captured Zelensky and his entourage on the opening day of the war too.

Those first few hours really were crucial - the real indictment of Russia is that once the "blitzkrieg" didn't come off, they had no effective Plan B.

The biggest benefit that the Ukrainians gained from their victory at Hostomel, I suspect, was morale, followed closely by the fact it protected Kiev (never a good situation in a war when you have to defend your own capital from intensive enemy attack).
Hostomel was very early evidence that the Russians could be defeated, which helped immensely.
Now, the longer the war drags on, the worse it is looking for Russia. Turkish drones and American rockets and etc. are showing no signs of stopping, and Russia will likely find it harder to replace its losses than Ukraine will.
Ukraine's basically got a brand new military courtesy of Erdogan, Biden, and EU. This is a massive setback for Russian geopolitical interests.

Any resurgent Russia in the coming decades will have to tend with this, first and foremost. It is distinctly possible, at the end of this war (when it comes) for all the conditions to be there for there to be an armed Ukraine, capable and firmly entrenched in the NATO bloc and set to be hosting NATO troops. It will be a dagger pointed right at the heartland of any Russian state opposed to the West, at a time when Russia's geographic armor has shrunk to the smallest it has been since the reign of Peter the Great, and rendered less and less valuable due to technological changes.

Russia is absolutely correct to be worried about the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. If the choice was NATO Ukraine or doing this war, this war would be better. Unfortunately for them, their gambit seems to be souring.

This is something to consider here. If Russia goes full-on mobilization, it will be because Putin and his brain trust see this undesirable outcome and see averting it as their best option.

At this point I'm not sure if we can even rule out Russia losing Crimea, if things go badly enough.  Russia might lose its naval base.

We need to consider the worst-case scenarios at this point. All major indicators point towards a  Ukrainian victory, unless Russia manages to salvage this war.

Are you sure about that?
If the rest of Eastern Europe is any guide, all NATO membership means is having a red line their military can’t cross and eventually losing some weapons contracts.
For all the hubbub about creeping NATO expansion, it only effects Russia if Russia intended to invade thr place and/or use the threat of the same to bully the local government.
And from our perspective, if Russia is intending to invade a place, creating a bright red line that effectively bars them from doing so on pain of Armageddon is the best possible deterrence.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Putin loses another boat.


https://mobile.twitter.com/H_Adventurer/status/1522692959656984576

The yacht is merely under tow in the Black Sea.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eu-russian-oil-ban-hits-131311689.html

Hungary looks set to put a stop to the European Union’s ban on Russian oil imports after leader Viktor Orbán compared the proposal to an atomic bomb.

Screw the EU then and each nation should unilaterally implement their sanctions .

Better yet. Kick Hungary out of the EU. It's high time. What a mistake that there are no official provisions for doing so.

Why do they have single members vetos?
Who looks at Poland-Lithuania and says ‘yeah, that’s a good idea’?

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Are we seriously sitting here worrying about Russian cultural acceptance in the place they are invading?

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Are we seriously sitting here worrying about Russian cultural acceptance in the place they are invading?

I don't think there's any problem in calling out deranged takes from either sides of the Ukraine-Russia border. "Ukraine's president is a Nazi" is deranged. "Let's keep people from enjoying Russian literature" is deranged.
Both can and should be called out.

War crimes are being committed in the name of one of these things and one is hypothetical.

So maybe we should modify the standards for calling out? Because creates a perception of moral equivalency where none exists.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

What would happen if Ukraine started to raid the Russian border?

Probably won't.

It would be an early Christmas present for Putin. "NATO is invading through their Banderovite proxies, we must mobilize, etc."

Probably wouldn't result in nukes, but he could use a few FOABs.

All in all, I don't think we should even be considering this avenue. UA has swaths of its territories under occupation, that will always take priority.

Anyone outside of Russia who would be outraged at Ukraine striking back is already stooging for them or too dumb to take seriously, and Russian opinion as far as I can tell is already strong and or controlled enough the Putin can do what he likes.

It’s probably not a realistic priority, but let’s not pretend it would be an escalation. As far as Ukraine’s concerned they’ve already fully escalated.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Tass: Russian-Occupied Ukraine Region to Ask to Join Russia

While the argument for this is stronger given most of these territories are Russian-speaking and there is an ethnic-based argument for these territories joining Russia this story reminds me a lot of 1944-1945 stories of various territories (mostly Bessarabia, Baltic states, and Western Ukraine) "voting" to join the USSR after the Red Army entered those territories.  Most of them already "voted" to join USSR in 1939 and 1941 respectively but they "voted" again in 1944-1945 just to make sure.

It really isn’t.

Lots of Ukrainians, and most Ukrainians of minority communities, use Russian as a first language because Russian was enforced in media and education up until the fall of the USSR, that doesn’t make them Russians.
As of 2001 (can’t get a more recent census), ethnic Ukrainians made up an absolute majority of the Donbass, with Russians as the largest but not only minority. The Luhansk and Donetsk guys are fringe nutjobs that took over on the backs of out of uniform Russian troops with the explicit goal of joining a, their words, revived Russian Empire.

The alleged nationality question in Ukraine, like virtually everywhere else, is just a smoke screen the Russians use to justify intervention in a post-Soviet Republic. There just aren’t masses of oppressed Russians yearning for the motherland’s bosom in Ukraine or really anywhere.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

By the way unlike Kharkov, Kyiv, and Luhansk/Donelson why was the southern front not an absolute disaster for Russians ?

Russian offensives have largely collapsed because they couldn’t secure major logics points and ground themselves into the cities. In Kherson they managed to take it early and the city itself serves as something of a fortress protecting the major bridges at on the lower part of the Dnieper. Meanwhile they were already in control via proxies of Donetsk, giving them control of two major cities anchoring their position between the eastern bank of the river and the Russian border at either end. So the Ukrainians weren’t able to try to relieve Mariupol and hamper Russian movement very effectively.

They do seem to have failed to make any advance west of the river. So Odessa and such seems safe by the standards of places in Ukraine right now.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

The ISW assesses that Russia will pursue one of three strategies:
1. Denial will continue and so will the Donbas offensive, followed by collapse
2. Mobilisation
3. Acceptance (at some point, after offensives stall) that territorial gains are maximal, followed by direct annexation of occupied regions, a (temporary?) halt to offensive operations, and a claim that a Ukrainian counteroffensive on them would fall under Russian nuclear doctrine

IMO, 3. would probably require a ceasefire first, and seems like a really poor idea. It works for South Ossetia, but when it comes to tens of thousands of troops in an active warzone, I would expect some of them to be willing to call any bluff.

1. could well lead to a coup.

Despite the political risk, I’d say 2. is the safest for Russia (of these options). Full mobilisation would at least allow inexperienced conscripts fresh of school to be replaced by reservists or ex-military who’d served for a minimum of one year, and their manpower problems are more acute than their equipment problems.

I think 1 is actually safer for Putin than 2. The backlash from failure is survivable for him, the Russian military proper has little to no pull politically and he has the security services locked down. There just isn’t anyone that can pull of a palace coup.
Full mobilization, however, would be very destabilizing. Contract soldiers are overwhelmingly from marginalized communities and disproportionately coming from remote minority dominated regions in the caucuses and Asiatic Russia and frankly your average man on the street in Petrograd doesn’t give a damn. When it’s masses of white kids from European Russia getting fed into that meat grinder I think he risks significant civil unrest.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

The pontoon bridge that was destroyed was to the north of Bilohorivka. Where the Russians had success crossing the Siversky Donets was to the east of Lyman/Yampil. Confirmed by Livemap and literally the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

I really wish you guys would stop the conclusions.. I talk about what's going on in Kharkiv & genocide going on in the occupied territories, civilians, unlawful annexations, etc.. and I cite my sources now when it's beyond reasonable doubt (geolocation and other 3rd parties) or it's either confirmed by both sides (UA General Staff and RU)

So how on earth is that not good enough?

They only want good news. If not you are either a Russian Teoll if you are a Blue Av, or a doomers if you are a Red Av.

I mean, if you actually read the tone of his posts, ‘Big News! Major Breakthrough at x! Combined with exclusively reporting claimed Russian advances, it’s hard to not read them as being typed with one hand.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

The ISW assesses that Russia will pursue one of three strategies:
1. Denial will continue and so will the Donbas offensive, followed by collapse
2. Mobilisation
3. Acceptance (at some point, after offensives stall) that territorial gains are maximal, followed by direct annexation of occupied regions, a (temporary?) halt to offensive operations, and a claim that a Ukrainian counteroffensive on them would fall under Russian nuclear doctrine

IMO, 3. would probably require a ceasefire first, and seems like a really poor idea. It works for South Ossetia, but when it comes to tens of thousands of troops in an active warzone, I would expect some of them to be willing to call any bluff.

1. could well lead to a coup.

Despite the political risk, I’d say 2. is the safest for Russia (of these options). Full mobilisation would at least allow inexperienced conscripts fresh of school to be replaced by reservists or ex-military who’d served for a minimum of one year, and their manpower problems are more acute than their equipment problems.

I think 1 is actually safer for Putin than 2. The backlash from failure is survivable for him, the Russian military proper has little to no pull politically and he has the security services locked down. There just isn’t anyone that can pull of a palace coup.
Full mobilization, however, would be very destabilizing. Contract soldiers are overwhelmingly from marginalized communities and disproportionately coming from remote minority dominated regions in the caucuses and Asiatic Russia and frankly your average man on the street in Petrograd doesn’t give a damn. When it’s masses of white kids from European Russia getting fed into that meat grinder I think he risks significant civil unrest.

I don’t know the extent to which this is false, but it is definitely false to some extent as no-one is ever truly safe from a palace coup. The distance between Putin and his ministers at meetings suggest he is taking some threat to his own life seriously, and that the likes of Strelkov are allowed to bad-mouth him and the war could mean he feels squashing them might generate the kind of backlash that might destabilise his reign.

Mobilisation is first applied to reserves who’ve done at least 1 year’s service - such people are also less likely to be upper-middle class Muscovites to begin with. As we’ve seen with the mobilisation in Crimea, it could also be rolled out region-by-region if Russia wished.

The general point is that I thought civil unrest was a greater threat to the regime than an internal coup

But holy sh**t do I stand corrected (maybe):

https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-coup-underway-impossible-to-stop-ukraine-military-intel-2022-5

Probably hope more than fact but fingers crossed

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

I assume it’s just milking concessions from Turkey.

For all the Eurasianist nonsense ont he ground, I assume the Turks remember that the last time we had a war mongering Russian Emperor Constantinople was on the wish list.
Or more seriously that NATO is effectively blocking them from screwing with the Black Sea.

Hungary, or rather Orban scares me though.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

I assume it’s just milking concessions from Turkey.

For all the Eurasianist nonsense ont he ground, I assume the Turks remember that the last time we had a war mongering Russian Emperor Constantinople was on the wish list.
Or more seriously that NATO is effectively blocking them from screwing with the Black Sea.

Hungary, or rather Orban scares me though.

How so? Turkey can wield the Montreux Convention all by itself.

Do you think Russia would respect it if Turkey didn’t have NATO at it’s back or do you think they would be demanding ‘renegotiation’.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-17/what-turkey-wants-from-sweden-and-finland-in-nato-expansion-spat

"What Turkey Wants From Sweden and Finland in NATO Expansion Spat"

Namely lifting of the arms embargo on Turkey with Turkey getting various weapons systems and banning KWP as terrorist group.

So now Sweden and Finland can virtual signal on Russia or Turkey but not both.

"Virtue signal".

You know it’s funny how that term is exclusively used by people trying to signal their virtue to fellow travelers.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://mobile.twitter.com/AggregateOsint/status/1526814175074336768

Funny that this is Sir woodbury's usual go to information source, and yet he somehow neglected to publish this information today. Yeah, it's good that we're not getting a Ukrainian propaganda/ cheerleading version of events, but from the news he obviously Cherry picks to report one would assume that the Russians are ready to roll into Kiev any week now which is obviously the near opposite of what's Happening . the fact he reports literally nothing but whatever, apparently in the big picture, minor gains Russia makes seems some weird combination of trolling, Shilling for Putin, and just plane Doomer ism.

Anyway, more to the point of this post, this sounds like a particularly big step forward for the Ukrainian counter-offensive if they are threatening the Russian supply lines into iyzum. No?

“May have” indicates there is more uncertainty regarding these Ukrainian gains than the Russian ones today. It’s obviously good news if confirmed, but the Donbas gains are probably more notable given the higher confidence with which they were reported. Russia’s recent gains there have mostly been tactical, but if they take Sieverodonetsk and Lyman, they get a shorter front line to maintain and Ukraine loses its only river crossings south of Izium.

We’ll even if the ‘may have’ is ‘didn’t’, successfully bridging the Donets, which Russia is hilariously flailing trying to do, is big.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1527225951775506433
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1527225956376657921
Things like this is what makes us look weak.

Oh FFS ‘because they could strike inside Russia’
Russia is at war with them. You don’t get to invade somewhere and then decide that you are off limits.

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

Instead of sending tanks to Ukraine Scholz is posting this:

https://twitter.com/GermanyNATO/status/1530166800490680320?s=20&t=yPngl6RQgx...

But like, if you shoot back isn’t that just as bad?

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

According to US intelligence sources inside the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin is sick with advanced cancer and survived an assassination attempt back in March apparently:

Exclusive: Putin Treated for Cancer in April, U.S. Intelligence Report Says

It’s increasingly seems like common knowledge, to the point that Putin’s team of doctors is leaking into the Russian press that he’s being treated for cancer.
Now whether that’s actually killing him or it’s in remission or what we don’t know.

But, if he is dying, that raises another problem. When Putin kicks it, no matter how it happens, the Russian far right will be convinced the CIA wacked him and then what happens?

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://en.mehrnews.com/news/187917/Ukraine-to-decide-how-much-territory-it-gives-to-Russia-NATO

"Ukraine to decide how much territory it gives to Russia: NATO"

The US-led alliance aims to strengthen Ukraine’s position at the negotiating table, Jens Stoltenberg said but added that any peace deal would involve compromises, including territory.

So  NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg admits that Ukraine will most likely have to cede territory as part of a peace deal.

Stoltenberg and  Germany and  France

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/1542621575404568583?s=20&t=tNzcj6DI...

‘Take Macron off call waiting’ got me

[Buffalo Mayor Young Kim]

My face when people use Russian speakers as a proxy for Russian collaborators